Solidity, by Greg Egan

Solidity is a play-with-the-rules story.  People, and some things, all of a sudden do not persist when they are not observed.  They get swapped for other, sort of similar people and things.  So all of a sudden you're in a somewhat different house, with similar but not related people.  So the story has two tracks--the social handling, and the "scientific" handling.  Our protagonist (a boy named Omar) keeps his cool and tries to start sorting things out.  Most others do too, working out a way to live.  There is a Solidity manifesto that people figure out how to persist.  More magical than Greg Egan usually gets, this could be a Seanan McGuire story.

TAP, by Greg Egan

TAP stands for Total Affect Protocol, a brain implant that gives the user a new, personal language--a way to express any emotion or thought, no matter how complex.  Nothing is ineffable.  One of its early users has died from what appear to be complications of the implant, but her daughter does not think so--she thinks it is murder.  So begins this story.

As always with Egan, the premise is one that will make you think hard.  In this case the premise is a bit of a stretch for me--it's hard to figure out what it truly means.  But the way the story proceeds makes it clearer as it goes along. The story winds up as a powerful combination of two future technologies--TAP and immersive virtual reality--and a very difficult moral dilemma.  Both technologies are frightening when carried to their logical conclusion, but even worse would be to have one without the other.  You'll have to read it to see why, the argument builds through the whole piece.

It's not hard to see why it was nominated for a Hugo in the novelette category in 1996.  Also understandable that it didn't win, because it's a challenging story to read, and you probably should read it more than once.  Now, I almost never read things more than once, but I do think about them, and the more I consider this story the better I like it.  Go read it, more than once if that's something you do, or read it closely if not.  Four stars.

Border Guards, by Greg Egan

Today I finished Border Guards, a Hugo-nominated novella from 2000. This one provides yet another reason to read lots of Greg Egan--a smoothly blended mix of hard science, strong characters, and probing of human nature. The story centers around Margit, a talented Quantum Soccer player new to the community of Noether. Noether is part of the New Territories, a mathematical extension of our familiar physical universe. You need to read it to get a decent explanation. What sets Margit apart is that she is old enough to have known death and suffering. These have been banished from existence, humans have complete control over their experiences and their minds are housed in nearly indestructible computers, fully backed up.

Unlike nearly all other authors exploring immortality, Egan presents it as pretty much a utopia. Life has been a long struggle to overcome death, and now the battle is won and there's no looking back. He rejects the dystopian visions as simple versions of the Naturalist fallacy--because death is inevitable for us now, we act as though overcoming it would be a bad thing.

It's unique, and I have to say I stand with the dystopians at this point. But it's a well stated case. Three stars

Oceanic, by Greg Egan

For my most recent read I went back to Greg Egan, a favorite author of mine. Oceanic is a Hugo award winning novella from 1999. It presents a study of Christianity lightly translated through a space colony, and takes on the difficult topic of whether religious faith can survive scientific discovery of its roots.

Spoiler Alert

I'll go ahead and give a spoiler here to make a point--go read it and come back if it is important. In Oceanic, the colonist's faith turns out to be biochemically induced. When the story was written this was purely speculative, but many scientific reductionists have believed all along that something like this was the case. Recent evidence is starting to lead in the direction that religious experiences can be stimulated from outside (see this Wired article for a skeptical view). If this turns out to go somewhere, whither faith? It will be interesting to see.

3 stars for the story itself.